Accessibility Tools
In Progress items
We’re currently evaluating support for PHP 8.1 as PHP 8 will be EOL (end of life) before long. While the underlying systems of CiviCRM and WordPress are already PHP 8.1 compatible, we have to ensure that all extensions are as well. We’re actively testing these as well as testing version 8.1 compatibility with Greenleaf ONE. Once this is stable, we will begin upgrading sites.
Searching for content in WordPress is, well, really basic. As sites become more complex by adopting plugins such as WooCommerce or by implementing custom post types, the default system search becomes less than ideal.
To address this, we’re actively reviewing various advanced search plugins that are high performing, flexible and compatible with the Greenleaf ONE roadmap.
WordFence is a great plugin, but unfortuntely it’s one of those that’s getting tough to support. For many, it’s overkill and can conflict with other important systems, like your CRM. Because we proactively monitor security threats using a remote service as well, we’re finding that we can likely move to a more focused solution that performs better overall. In fact, we’re actively testing a change from WordFence to Akeeba’s AdminTools.
For Greenleaf ONE users, you won’t notice any difference as we tend to limit access to these types of security related plugins.
We will now be providing the Recurring Contributions extension as part of our standard ONE implementation. This extension provides enhanced functionality for recurring contributions, most notably providing standard tokens that make communicating with donors about their contribution subscription possible. There are also options for making the recurring option required on contribution pages, and some others functionality as well. For a full description of the extension’s capabilities, please go here.
We’ll be adding this extension to existing systems over the next month. It is not available in the standard CiviCRM extension interface, so if you are interested in having it loaded on your system sooner, please let us know by sending an email to support@greenleafadvancement.com.
Let’s face it, the WordPress admin menus leave more than a little to be desired. They are a bit unorganized and can easily get cluttered as new post types and plugins are added. To address this, we’re adopting a new system to clean up the WordPress admin menus and make them more intuitive for users. Naturally, the menu items will respond to the user permissioning and will hide or be exposed based on each user’s role thereby keeping the user interface cleaner and more tailored to each user.
This will be rolling out in the coming weeks and should clean up things a bit.
Ok, that title sounds a little obscure. Even still, this is one improvement in the works that you should definitely pay attention to. Essentially, this improvement will create unique “tables” for each SearchKit saved search. Why is that important? Because, we can easily map the data from these tables via the Page Builder. This is powerful because 1) saved searches in SearchKit are “smart”, meaning that they update based on the established search parameters and 2) because you can build very complex searches using related data.
This combination allows you to easily display complex data that dynamically updates. Perhaps an example is in order. Suppose you use CiviCRM’s peer to peer fundraising capabilities and you want to display a table listing of these each displaying the contribution page author, the number of contributors and the total contributed. In this scenario, not only do you have related data, you have on the fly calculations.
Because this information would all be readily available in a single table, it will be super easy to grab it and display it across any type of elements be it a table, grid, chart… literally, any element you want. And because you can apply access controls, you can easily display this to authenticated users. Using the same example, imagine that you only want to display this to your board of directors and to staff. Easy peasy!
We’re very excited about this feature, so much so that we’re helping fund the CiviCRM Core Team to bring it online. Stay tuned for this one!
Currently in the page builder, users can filter dynamic content only at a fairly basic level. While this works for most, we want to extend the filtering of content to include custom fields. This means that users can display dynamic content in such a way that it could be easily filtered based on custom structured data. This functionality currently supports default WordPress posts and will be rolling out in June. We’re actively developing support for custom post types as well and will upgrade once this functionality is tested. Advanced Content Filters is a first step to extending the filter support for remote sources as well, such as to data stored in CiviCRM.
Email deliverability, both for mass email as well as transactional emails, is absolutely vital to the operation of your CRM and your organization. While the current systems we use are solid, we are actively adopting an external provider that focuses exclusively on email systems. More than anything, this is to proactively ensure that emails are delivered consistently and without interruption. At present, there is no planned cost increase as a result. Any upgrade to such a service reflects our commitment to bringing together the best systems for your organization.
The lastest CiviCRM security release (5.58.1) is introducing new conflicts with Caldera Forms, resulting in both fatal errors and, more commonly, performance issues. Likewise, as of February 25th, Caldera Forms has been pulled down from the WordPress extensions directory. I think the writing is on the wall.
We’re working to replace Caldera Forms on current installations of Greenleaf ONE and are no longer shipping it on any new installations. If you use Caldera, we’ll be in touch with a plan to shift you off of it and on to better tools. This is just a heads up, not need to lose sleep over this transition.
We’re consolidating user permissions to one plugin and are implementing a more defined hierarchy of permissions. Many current users of Greenleaf ONE will experience no real impact whereas others may find that some restrictions have been placed on their role.
This is not at all to be heavy-handed, but rather out of an abundance of caution for security reasons as well as to continue to consolidate plugins and users’ ability to run “upgrades”. Greenleaf ONE is built not only to be a wholly integrated system for nonprofits, but it’s also intended to be stable and performant (naturally!). In order to achieve this, we have to ensure consistency in upgrades as well as control the addition and management of extensions.
The improvements in user permissions will also include new resources for users, be they administrative or public users, such as members, donors, etc. These are designed to improve the overall user experience and to put the right resources at each user’s fingertips.